When I started my career in search engine optimization, I was 16 years old. And, just like most 16-year-olds, I didn’t worry much about search engine “consequences.” In my fairytale world, they didn’t really exist at
We all learn to know better as we age, but you have to keep in mind that I was naive. When I started my journey into the world of SEO strategy, I didn’t worry about the search engine rules … I just did whatever I wanted.
If you fast forward to today, I don’t leverage or practice black hat SEO or other negative SEO techniques when it comes to internet marketing. After all, there are plenty of above-board SEO tactics to turn to.
So, what is black hat SEO, exactly?
Black hat strategies involve everything from keyword stuffing and private blog networks (PBNs) to content automation and tiered link building.
Most of those strategies get a bad rap for a good reason.
But there is one thing you should keep in mind.
Black hat SEO is simply a good strategy gone wrong.
If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t have dabbled in the art of the dark side. Why? Because if I had spent all that time and energy on legitimate search engine optimization tactics, I would have created a much larger long-term business.
I won’t bore you with the reasons you should avoid black hat SEO when trying to get better search results, as you already know them. Instead, I’m going to share with you seven crazy tactics (with data) that I leveraged as a kid.You’ll quickly see that I was a really creative kid … and it’s one of the main reasons I do well as an internet marketing expert today.
Crazy Tactic #1: TwitThis
What’s one thing that every blog has? Well, of course, every blog has content and a content marketing campaign … but they also have social media sharing buttons
Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. Even LinkedIn. You see these social sharing buttons everywhere. But that wasn’t always the case.
When Twitter first came out, it didn’t have “tweet” buttons. Heck, people weren’t even calling them “tweets.”
So, my internet marketing team and I created our own Twitter social media sharing buttons that people could embed into their websites. We called these Twitter sharing buttons “TwitThis” (you can see what the original site looked like below):
How did it do? Well, so many people started embedding TwitThis buttons on their sites that the website once had a Google PageRank of 8 and over 54 million backlinks
Crazy Tactic #2: Battlefield Bypass
I know what you are thinking. “What the heck is battlefield bypass?”
You’re probably already familiar with the search engine tactic involving buying expired domains. I took a bit of a different strategy when I was younger. I would buy only expired domains related to world history, as it increased the likelihood of .edu and .gov backlinks.
One of the domains I acquired was called battlefieldbypass.com. It was a website that used to be related to the Civil War.
When I acquired it, it had hundreds of link building ops, and many of them were from government-run websites.
I quickly acquired the site and turned it into an online casino site. Within a few months, the site ranked No. 2 on Google for the term “online casino,” which is still a highly competitive term on the search engines.
On the website, I listed out the top 10 online casinos that someone could sign up for. Whenever a user signed up because of my site, I got paid an affiliate commission. The site was averaging $40,000 to $60,000 a month. Apparently, I didn’t do a great job at fine-tuning the site for affiliate income, as the person ranking above me was making over $100,000 each month.
A lot of SEOs still leverage expired domains … but very few focus on ones that contain .gov and .edu links, even though they tend to be the most powerful. You also have to pay more for these expired domain names, but I never understood why someone would try to save a few bucks when the difference could mean ranking No. 1 on the search engine versus not.
Crazy Tactic #3: I Can Has Poker?
Do you remember a crazy cat website called I Can Has Cheezburger? I don’t know how popular the site is in the search results at the moment, but it used to generate around 500 million page views a month. Not too shabby for a site full of cat memes.
The audience was so loyal that I partnered with them to run a contest. The contest was a poker giveaway in which one person would win a two-night trip to Las Vegas with $500 in spending cash and free airfare for two individuals to and from Las Vegas.
I can’t find the page on I Can Has Cheezburger that discusses the contest (guessing they removed it), but here is a snapshot:
Create a funny cat meme related to poker (they have a meme creator on their site).
Embed the cat meme on your website to enter (the embed code linked back to my poker site).